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Microsoft Office 365 home premium launched in India for a price of INR 420/- per month

Office 365 is Microsoft’s re-invention of the Office suite that is ubiquitous across all major PC platforms. It’s the well known and widely used Office, on the cloud. With the Office 365, Microsoft has switched to a different business model, in which users are required to buy a subscription for Office 365, which is available in various flavours like Student, Home office and Home premium. The Office 365 Home Premium costs Rs, 4,199/- per year and Rs. 420/- per month, and users can choose accordingly. The advantage of a subscription model is that one can upgrade to the next Office without paying a fee, and that is strictly only applicable under the subscription model. Otherwise, Microsoft is also selling traditional boxed copies of Office 2013, but this time, it’s completely downloadable, and boxes don’e have a DVD, they just have the code. Looks like Microsoft is really pushing for the cloud, eh?

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft says – “This isn’t just another version of Office. This is Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service. Together with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Office 365 gives you the freedom to do things when and how you want.” And rightly so, this is probably the boldest Office in terms of the business model, but we are yet to see a re invention around the user interface, we know it has changed quite a bit for the desktop, but the touch applications are due, and OneNote MX, with its radial menus are the only hope of Office coming to tablets in the right form.

Regarding the pricing, the subscription for the Home premium version of the Office 365 software will fetch you the usual applications like Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel and more, and not only that, an Office 365 subscription includes 20GB of SkyDrive storage. So all these features + the pricing at 420 Indian rupees per month seems pretty decent if Office is and has been integral for your day to day work. And if you are looking at just casual usage and not willing to pay for Office, then you always have the free Office Web apps for direct access from Skydrive. Considering Skydrive is the core backend of Office on the cloud, the service is set to get even more popular.

So, what do you think about the prices? Let us know in the comments section below.